Watch first gameplay from Bad Blood, Dying Light's standalone battle royale-style mode

Bad Blood is an upcoming expansion to zombie masher Dying Light that's inspired by Battle Royale games—six players are dumped in a city arena and asked to fight through zombies to reach an extraction chopper, all the while keeping their eyes peeled for other humans. Developer Techland unveiled it last year following "numerous fan requests", and now it's shown off ten minutes of the game in action.

You'll see a fair amount of jank in the gameplay footage above, especially in the PvP melee fights, but that's to be expected given that it's still in the pre-alpha stage. It gives you a good idea of what to expect from a round of Bad Blood: you begin by looting buildings, gathering bows, grenades and pipes to bash zombies with. Then, you seek out 'hives' of zombies, which you have to destroy to earn 'samples'. You can only escape on the extraction chopper if you've collected a certain number of samples, which gives you an incentive to wade in.

In the footage, first shown off by IGN, the player battles a Goon, a giant zombie swinging a huge makeshift hammer. Again, it's fairly janky (the player ends up walking up behind the Goon and slashing them repeatedly in the back with a tiny knife), but it's got some potential to get hectic, especially if the slower zombies decide to get involved in the fight.

The satisfying zombie beheading from Dying Light is still apparent when the player takes on smaller groups, and Techland will hopefully bring the rest of the game up to that standard. The game's parkour mechanics fit in well, too, because once one player gathers enough samples, everybody will have to rush to the extraction point, which could be a long way away.

There's definitely still work to do, but I'm glad we've got a better idea of the direction in which the game is heading. Bad Blood is due out at some point this year. What do you think of what Techland has shown off?

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.